


what stays and what fades away

by shiningjedi



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Gen, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-18 19:23:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13106880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiningjedi/pseuds/shiningjedi
Summary: Barriss Offee - "regret".Locked away in Coruscant's high-security prison, Barriss thinks, and weeps, and maybe gets a little violent.





	what stays and what fades away

Barris had asked the guards for a head covering, had tried to explain how it was inappropriate for anybody but her closest relatives or lovers to observe her hair, but the guards either ignored or could not hear her through the prison shield wall. This went into explaining why, at the present moment, she was awkwardly curled up against the cold metal wall, ducking her head tucked between the knees of her orange jumpsuit every time somebody passed her cell on a patrol.

_Anybody but the closest relatives or lovers…._

_Or lovers…._

_Lovers…._

Had Ahsoka been a lover? Could her feelings, buried and repressed and fought against by the pressure of the war and the obsessive need to be perfect, somehow, possibly, have been reciprocated?

Had the girl she’d betrayed _loved_ her?

Regret suddenly coalesced in her stomach and travelled up her oesophagus, already weak from her refusal to eat the meat that was her rations’ only source of protein, and she was retching and vomiting against the prison floor, choking and her tongue catching on the bitter remnants of synthesized bread and vegetables.

The feeling of nausea didn’t stop when her stomach was emptied, and the screaming in her head and chest grew louder and louder until she was screaming herself to drown out the pain of it, straining the muscles in her throat to the point of microtears.

She struggled to prop herself onto her elbows. People were _dying_.

 _Jedi_ were dying.

 _Ahsoka_ was – no, she couldn’t be certain, she had cut out their bond, hacked at it with clumsy mental shears until it went away. She couldn’t know for certain that the girl that she had loved was dead.

The same for Luminara.

A strand of hair floated past her face.

She screamed again, clawed at her cheeks until her nails were caked with blood from the ritual tattoos that she did not deserve; she distantly sensed the cell boundary vanishing, armoured guards running to her and restraining her, stopping her from injuring herself further.

One was touching her hair.

She screamed a last time, shrill and piercing and somehow _wrong_ , and the universe seemed to shift and crack in all her senses, until it suddenly stopped and _she_ was the centre of it.

Her vision was tinged with yellow. The guards were dead.

As she fell onto the ground once more and wept, a worming, insidious little voice in the back of her skull whispered _good_.

It was the voice of the Supreme Chancellor.


End file.
